Podia vs Kit: Which one is right for my business?
Both Podia and Kit are popular creator tools, but they're designed for different kinds of businesses. Kit is focused on email and growing your subscriber list, while Podia brings your website, products, community, and email together in one place. Let's take a closer look so you can choose the right fit for your work.
Podia vs Kit plans and pricing
Podia has a 30-day free trial and Kit has a 14-day free trial plus a free Newsletter plan. When you're ready to grow, here's how pricing works on each.
Podia pricing
Podia has three plans: Mover, Shaker, and Earthquaker. All Podia plans come with your website, digital products, courses, community, and unlimited customers and sales.
- Mover: $49/month and 5% transaction fee ($42/month when paid annually). Includes your community, website builder, blog, landing pages, digital products, and courses, with 50 products, 500 videos, and 25 community spaces. This plan has 100 email subscribers included.
- Shaker: $99/month and 0% transaction fee ($84/month when paid annually). Includes everything in Mover, plus affiliate marketing, upsells, an assistant seat, and integrations with PayPal, Zoom, and Zapier, with 150 products, 1000 videos, and 100 community spaces. This plan has 500 email subscribers included.
- Earthquaker: $179/month and 0% transaction fee ($150/month when paid annually). Includes everything in Shaker, with unlimited products, video storage, assistants, and community spaces. This plan has 1000 email subscribers included.
All Podia plans include email marketing features like unlimited automations, newsletters, email templates, segmentation, tagging, and campaigns. You also get unlimited email sends on all plans.
Each plan has a set number of subscribers included, and you can add on more at any time as your list grows.
- Mover includes up to 100 subscribers
- Shaker includes up to 500
- Earthquaker includes up to 1,000
If you need more space, you can head to your billing page to increase your subscriber limit.
Podia also includes a free migration service on paid plans. The team will move your products, email list, and customers over from another platform so you can get set up faster.
Kit pricing
Kit has three plans: Newsletter, Creator, and Pro. Kit's pricing scales with the size of your email list, so the price of each paid plan rises as you add subscribers.
- Newsletter: Free for up to 10,000 subscribers, with limited automations. Includes one basic visual automation, landing pages and forms, unlimited email broadcasts, audience tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products and subscriptions.
- Creator: Starts at $39/month ($33/month paid annually) for 1,000 subscribers. Includes everything in Newsletter, plus unlimited visual automations and email sequences, SMS marketing, apps and integrations, and the ability to remove Kit branding.
- Pro: Starts at $79/month ($66/month paid annually) for 1,000 subscribers. Includes everything in Creator, plus subscriber engagement scoring, engagement analytics, an insights dashboard, deliverability reporting, and a newsletter referral system.
One thing to note is that Kit charges a transaction fee of 3.5% + 30c on digital products and subscriptions across all plans.
Let’s see how that plays out by the numbers:
Because both platforms charge more as your subscriber list grows, the clearest way to compare is at the same list size. Here's how each base plan looks at 10,000 email subscribers:
- Podia Mover: $119/month
- Podia Shaker: $169/month
- Podia Earthquaker: $249/month
- Kit Creator: $139/month
- Kit Pro: $189/month
At this list size, Podia's Mover comes in below Kit's Creator plan, and Podia's Shaker comes in below Kit's Pro plan.
It's also worth considering what's included. With Podia, your website, community, courses, and products are part of the price. With Kit, you'll likely pay for separate tools to handle those parts of your business, which can add to your overall costs over time.
Email marketing in Podia and Kit
Kit is built around email, with a strong focus on their visual automation builder, email sequences, A/B testing, and detailed subscriber analytics on its higher plans. You can send email newsletters, create email opt-in forms, use email templates, and create automations to keep the email side of your business running smoothly.
To monetize your newsletter, Kit offers paid newsletters, and higher-tier plans have newsletter sponsorships and paid recommendations.
Podia includes full email marketing on every plan, with newsletters, email automations, segmentation, tagging, campaigns, and customizable templates. Because everything in Podia is connected, you can pull product links, blog posts, and content straight into an email, and trigger automations based on what someone has bought or how they've engaged with your business.
For example, you can automatically send an email when someone signs up for your community or registers for a live event, or you can send broadcasts just to people who have spent a certain amount with your business. All those filters are built in, so you can stay in touch with the right people at the right time.
On the analytics side, Podia Email automatically keeps track of who opened what email, what links they clicked, and how many sales were generated from each of your messages. Because everything is connected, you don’t need to do complicated calculations to know what campaigns are driving the best results.
If you want to monetize your newsletter, you can set up a subscription product or community plan, set your pricing, and then send exclusive emails to the people who have access. You can also include products and discussion spaces so your newsletter subscribers can get to know one another.
Selling products with Podia and Kit
With Podia, you can sell courses, digital downloads, in-person and virtual events, coaching, and bundles. You can sell products as standalone items or combine them with community access to give your students a more interactive experience.
With Podia courses, you can add videos, images, embeds, audio files, and other file types, and you can give your course participants a discussion space so they can ask questions and share what they’re learning. Courses have features like quizzes and completion certificates, and each product can have seat limits, upsells, access duration limits, coupons, and future start dates.
Kit lets you sell digital downloads and subscriptions and set up a simple digital store, but courses and community aren't built in.
Creators who are interested in these features can add them through Kit's App Store using third-party tools. This can work well if you're happy connecting separate tools, but it does mean your courses and community live outside the core platform.
Community with Podia and Kit
Podia includes community as a built-in feature. You can create spaces where members post and comment, add member profiles, search, and chat, and gate certain spaces by plan or product. That makes it possible to build VIP areas, course-specific discussions, or separate groups for different memberships, all inside the same platform.
Kit doesn't include a native community. To build one, you'd connect and pay for a separate community tool through Kit's App Store.
Growing your audience with Podia and Kit
On the audience growth side, Kit has the basics like email sign-up forms and lead magnets, as well as some specific tools for newsletter growth. There’s a Recommendations feature that lets creators recommend each other's newsletters, so other audiences can discover you, and Paid Recommendations and newsletter sponsorships give you additional ways to grow and earn from your list.
Another way to grow your audience is through your online presence. Kit gives you landing pages and newsletter forms, but not a full website or blog, so many creators need to use a separate website.
Podia approaches growth by giving you a full website, blog, landing pages, and lead magnets so people can find you through search, read your content, and then join your email list. From there, you can guide them toward your products and community with automated email sequences and upsells, all in one place.
Beyond your website, Podia has a built-in affiliate marketing tool so you can let your happy customers share your business with their audiences. Plus, you can set up lead magnets, make email sign-up forms, offer free community access, and give free trials to get more people in the door.
Who is Kit best for?
Kit works well if you’re looking for an email newsletter tool and you don't need a website, community, or courses built into the same platform. It works well for creators who:
- Are mainly looking to grow and monetize their newsletter (and want the option to start for free)
- Are interested in growing their newsletter through Recommendations and newsletter sponsorships
- Already have a website, or are comfortable connecting separate tools for things like courses and community
(Pro tip: Podia has a built-in integration with Kit, so if you’d like to use Podia for your courses and community, that connection is seamless!)
Who is Podia best for?
Podia is a great fit if you want your website, products, community, and email connected in one place, without relying on a collection of separate tools. It works well for creators who:
- Want their website, blog, products, email, and community fully connected in one platform
- Sell a range of things, like courses, digital downloads, coaching, and events, alongside their email marketing
- Want community built in rather than added through a third-party tool
- Love the simplicity that comes from everything being connected, like one-click blog post emailing, quick linking to products, and automatic email filters
- Prefer the option to remove transaction fees as the business grows
Podia is especially helpful if products and community are a core part of your business, with email working alongside them rather than standing on its own.